Twenty million years ago, the shores of northern Taiwan were sandstone deposits at the bottom of the sea, where 6-foot worms lurked in their holes, waiting for unsuspecting prey to seize.d. Now a team of geoscientists has chronicled 319 trace fossils of the carnivorous marine worms, the cavity of which fossilized in the Miocene mug.
“In the beginning, we were firmly convinced that it was a very fine shrimp farmer,” Ludvig Löwemark, a sedimentologist at the National University of Taiwan, said in a video call. ‘And when we talked to some other experts, we leaned on this two-pronged hypothesis. In the end, we became more and more convinced that it was actually a bobbit worm that made this trail. ‘
Trace fossils are remnants of the creatures that made them – footprints and other hardy remnants of the animals’ movements in life, rather than the fossil remains of the insects themselves. The worms that were previously inhabited, according to researchers, are long gone and probably consist of soft tissues that deteriorated shortly after death. An analysis of the fossils is published today in the journal Scientific Reports.
Löwemark’s team, led by Yu-Yen Pan at the National University of Taiwan, discovered hundreds of important points that jut out the rocky shores of Taiwan. They found that the holes rotated horizontally as they became deeper, forming a boomerang-shaped hollow that was about 1 inch wide and 6 feet deep. The decreasing turn of the hollow suggested to the team that the earth beneath the essence becomes more difficult to dig through at a certain depth or becomes more anoxic. (Worms breathe through their skin, so if the soil in which they are immersed does not have enough oxygen, it can be deadly).
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Where the holes lead to the then seabed, there was a ‘spring’ pattern that the team identified, which suggested that the salt bottom collapsed in a funnel shape around the structure, indicating a vacuum created by a essentially left behind is his lair. They concluded that the animals that made the holes are related to the killer bobbit worms of today, which are still up to 10 feet long and are named after a notorious 1990 criminal case with a severed penis (although it may be time to alter that name). The trace fossils in Taiwan are mentioned Pennichnus formosae, which means “beautiful feather tracks”, the last name is derived from the Portuguese name for Taiwan, Formosa.
“It does not matter who made it; it is the shape and function of the track fossil that gets a name,” Löwemark said. “So you have a species for similar characteristics, fossils that are produced in a specific way, due to feeding behavior or locomotion or whatever … and then you have a species name.”
After clearing out other culprits, the shrimp would have left ‘turning points’ in their pit, while the worms are more one-way operation, and a two-colored suspect a dead end at the end of the hollow signs where it made room for his shell. has – a bird of prey worm seems to fit the profile. Today, the bobbit worm is chasing sensation: if it notices a disturbance outside its lair, the worm is quickly armed with hardened pincers. If held well, the worm stabs the prey into its hollow, and the sand pours over the entrance, hiding the grim scene. If you had cut, you would never have known it happened.
“This is a very cruel procedure,” Löwemark explained.
If you think about it on a large scale – the team found hundreds of these holes on two sites along the coast – it sounds like a scary, inverted game of a slap-a-mole.